


Wild Beasts

by Moorishflower



Category: Psych
Genre: Flashback, Gen, Shawn/Lassiter - Freeform, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-05
Updated: 2009-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-02 12:33:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlton and Shawn meet for the first time in 1995 after high school senior Shawn is brought in for public indecency. Carlton knows what it's like to feel pushed. Shawn just wants to push back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild Beasts

**Wild Beasts**

 

Carlton remembers his joy at finally receiving his badge. He remembers the awe he felt when he first held a gun (age ten, his father taking him to a shooting range and allowing him to wrap his tiny fingers around the black trigger, the resistance tight against his skin), and the terror when he realized that guns could damage people he _loved_ as well as people who _deserved_ it. The Lassiter family has always been full of generals, cops, those who uphold the law.

Sometimes it has not turned out for the best.

But that is all beside the point, because Carlton is _here_ and he is _now_, and he is _finally_ being asked to lead an interrogation.

Well, not really an _interrogation_. More like a ‘questioning.’

Or maybe more like a ‘watch my son while I go and sort this mess out’ from Officer Spencer.

But still. _Progress_.

So (because he can still remember what it was like to be a teenager, and because he _knows_ what it’s like to work under Officer Spencer) he runs over to Duncan Donuts and buys, with his own money, the most caffeine-laden thing on the menu and carries it back to the precinct. The coffee smells rich and sweet, and Carlton wasn’t sure about how Officer Spencer’s kid likes it so he just got it black and stuffed some cream and sugar packets in his pockets. It smells like hazelnut. Flavor of the day, he guesses.

The precinct bustles, a well-oiled machine, and Carlton slips through the crowds of officers filing paperwork and unlocking the handcuffs from freed suspects and Detectives standing around and looking important. Someday, he thinks, _he_ will be able to pull off that effortless grace. He hopes it’s someday soon, but he doesn’t mind waiting for a bit. After all, Victoria has wanted to spend more time with him lately, and he thinks that being a Detective will take away from that.

He still has trouble believing it. _Engaged_. He is engaged to a beautiful, smart, wonderful woman. Even if her father hates him (which will be fixed once he proves himself by becoming a Detective. _Head_ Detective, even! No way her old man would be able to resist that).

Officer Spencer mentioned interrogation room number five. He hadn’t actually specifically said to _go in_, but Carlton is younger than Spencer is, and he thinks he knows better how to take care of a rebellious teenager.

Except when he steps into the blank, gray room, it’s not a teenager he’s facing.

_Officer Spencer didn’t mention how tired his son looks,_ he thinks vaguely, taking in the shaggy and unkempt hair (like he’d just rolled out of bed), the dark circles beneath his eyes, the sharp purple-red of a fresh hickey blooming just beneath the curve of his jaw. Carlton clears his throat, and the kid focuses abruptly. As if he were somewhere far away.

“Tell me my dad didn’t send you to baby sit me,” he says, sounding amused and hurt and annoyed all at once. It’s the _hurt_ that gets to Carlton, makes him shake his head as he sets the coffee down on the table and slides into the opposite seat. A little white lie never hurt anybody.

“Just here on my own,” he says softly. Teenagers are like frightened animals. He spent most of his high school years terrified and angry and lashing out at everything; he remembers. He _knows_. “I brought you coffee. Seemed like you could use a pick-me-up.”

The kid eyes him warily, then with slow, deliberate movements he reaches across the table and snags the cup, pops the lid off and brings it to his face so he can inhale the smell of it.

“Hazelnut,” he says approvingly, takes a sip and then makes a face. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any…?”

Carlton doesn’t wait, only reaches into his pockets and dumps the cream and sugar packets onto the table. The kid smiles. He has a nice smile, all white teeth and quirky lips. He’s not what Carlton would call ‘conventionally handsome,’ which leads him to wonder who, exactly, put that hickey there.

He’s not married yet. An engagement is only a _promise_. It’s okay if he looks or wonders about things so long as he doesn’t break that promise. Not that he would, anyway. He loves Victoria. He wants to spend the rest of his life with her, cranky father-in-law or not.

“Thanks,” the kid says, dumps in two packets of sugar, two creams, and then uses his finger to stir them together. Afterwards he sucks the finger into his mouth, and Carlton looks away from that quick pink tongue.

“You’re the one dad called a rookie,” the kid notes. “I’m Shawn. You been here long?”

“Carlton Lassiter,” Carlton answers, and, “a few months.”

“You like it here?”

Carlton pauses. He honestly has to _think_ about that. _Does_ he like it here? Victoria is here, so he likes that, but there’s not a city or town in the whole state where he couldn’t get a job on the force if he wanted to.

Santa Barbara is just…home.

“I do okay,” he says after a few minutes. Shawn’s mouth turns up in a lopsided little smile.

“You’re allowed to call my dad a tightass in front of me,” he says after taking a long sip. He sounds almost like he’s laughing. “I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna tell him.”

“I thought my dad was a tightass, too,” Carlton murmurs. He watches the movements of Shawn’s throat, the soft bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows, the skin around the hickey seeming twice as pale in comparison. Shawn watches him, watching Shawn.

“Meaning you don’t anymore.”

“Not for a long time.”

“Oh.”

Shawn seems uncomfortable with dealing with emotions, the topic of fathers, but not with Carlton’s gaze on his neck. He decides that Shawn is probably of above-average intelligence (possibly _far_ above-average) and most likely hit sexual maturity _years_ ago. He has the easy grace of someone who is comfortable with his body, which is unusual for a teenager.

There is no doubt that this is Henry Spencer’s son.

“You should shave that ‘stache, man,” Shawn says, and it’s so out of the blue, so _random_ that Carlton has to take a moment and compose himself. Shawn’s eyes are a sort of greenish-grey color, like certain types of moss.

“What?”

“The ‘_stache_.” Shawn is adamant. He leans across the interrogation table, invading Carlton’s space without a second thought, and lays a soft finger right next to Carlton’s mouth. It brushes the edge of his mustache, and it kind of tickles. Shawn is very, very close.

“I like my mustache,” he protests. Victoria says it makes him look manlier. Secretly, he thinks that _she_ thinks it makes him look slightly more like her father. Shawn’s finger sweeps down, touches his bottom lip. He belatedly remembers that there are security cameras in the interrogation rooms, and resolves to erase all evidence of this talk after whatever happens…happens.

“It makes you look like a porn star,” Shawn murmurs, the calluses on his thumb catching at minute cracks in Carlton’s bottom lip. He sticks his tongue out, moistens the trail that Shawn’s fingers are traveling, and is gratified when it provokes a sudden and intense interest in the shape of his mouth.

He supposes it says a lot about him when the next thing out of his mouth is not, ‘I’m engaged,’ but rather, “You’re half my age.”

“I’m eighteen,” Shawn says, like that makes everything okay, and lays himself out across the table with a sinuous grace that makes Carlton’s breath catch in his throat.

Except. _Except_.

_Someday, rookie, you and your wife will have kids of your own. And you’ll know what it’s like to be the center of someone’s universe. Let me tell you now, it’s not as much fun as it sounds._

He catches Shawn’s hand, turns it over and presses the back of it to his mouth. Not moving, not kissing. Shawn eyes him, suspicious.

“You should try and get along with your dad,” Carlton murmurs against skin that’s salt-sweaty and too pliant to be anything but _young_. “I know he’s tough, and he probably pushes you to hell and back, but he’s the only one you’ll ever have. Trust me.”

And Shawn, slowly, draws back from the touch, retreats into himself, sips his coffee and, after a while, continues to make fun of Carlton’s mustache.

But see, he doesn’t mind. Because teenagers are like frightened animals, and sometimes you have to take a few scratches before you can get close to them.

(And if he goes home that night and takes a good, long look at himself in the mirror, at the man he is now and the man he could become, and deftly erases every trace of that admittedly _stupid_-looking mustache, then that’s his business and his alone. And possibly Shawn’s, but mostly his.)

 

\- And Eleven Years Later –

 

Carlton thinks he should feel angry and insulted. He thinks that his relationship with his partner being exposed (and honestly, it wasn’t that _great_ of a relationship anyways, just him trying to forget Victoria) should make him feel foolish. Duped, somehow.

But all he feels is a vague sense of familiarity. Shawn Spencer, the SBPD’s new head psychic, with his moss-green eyes and his slicked back hair.

Carlton reaches up to touch his smooth cheek, smooth since the day he decided that he wasn’t going to be Victoria’s father for her, and recognizes the smell of salt-sweat and shaving cream and coffee, but cannot remember why.


End file.
